The Original In and Out Election Financing 
When the controversy first erupted about the Conservative "in and out" transfers between their local and national campaigns, the term had a vaguely familiar ring to it.
Listening today to one Bloc Québécois MP after another get up to denounce "in and out" financing and praise Elections Canada, those bells started to ring even louder.
Finally it came to me.
The term "in and out" in connection with election financing was first used by my former colleague and classmate Andrew McIntosh to describe a lucrative arrangement cooked up by the Bloc to take advantage of a loophole in election financing laws to extract the maximum amount of taxpayer-funded refunds from Elections Canada. We might never have heard about it if Bloc MP Jean-Paul Marchand hadn't balked at the obligation to spend the maximum amount possible on his campaign in the 2000 election, prompting a court case, a scandal and a decision to close the loophole.
I seem to recall that the Bloc weren't as great fans of Elections Canada then as they seem to be now.
Who knows. Perhaps the Bloc is now denouncing a practice it inspired.
No comments:
Post a Comment